Lumen Bioscience

Congratulations to the Winners of the 9th Annual MTEC Membership Meeting Awards! 🏆 Special Recognition Award Presented by Mr. Bill Howell, MTEC President * Winner: Dawn Rosarius, former principal assistant for acquisition MRDC for her contributions and support of MTEC over the years 🏆 Prototype of the Year Awards Presented by Lauren Palestrini, PhD, MTEC Chief Science Officer * Winner: Lumen Bioscience * Winner: LifeLens Technologies, Inc. For their outstanding progress and high military need 🏆 Sponsor Recognition Award Presented by Ms. Kathy Zolman, MTEC Chief of Consortium Operations * Winner: Combat Casualty Care Research Program for their support accelerating prototype development Congratulations to these outstanding individuals and organizations for their exceptional contributions to advancing medical technology. Your dedication and innovation are truly inspiring! #MTEC2024 #AwardWinners #Innovation #MedTech #HealthcareExcellence

This week, Brian Finrow joins the #businessofbiotech for a candid conversation on the advantages--and the disadvantages--of being a #biotech "outsider." His company, Lumen Bioscience, doesn't do #antibody science the old-fashioned way, and as a result, it doesn't raise funds the old-fashioned way, either. Finrow's perspective is an honest and refreshing one, and Lumen's story of novelty, grit, and success proves that true innovation isn't bred by the way it's always been done. Watch the full episode here, or listen in anywhere you subcribe to podcasts. https://lnkd.in/gXZhFj85

I’m proud to share that John Morrow has joined the executive team here at Lumen Bioscience as Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel. As our programs have moved into late-stage development, the operational, legal, and financial complexity have matured. Having a leader of John’s caliber on our side will set us up for success in what comes next.

Fast-growing Lumen Bioscience is searching for talented people for open roles across all areas of biopharma drug development. Are you one? It's more interesting, challenging, and meaningful work than you can be doing anywhere else right now. Come join us! https://lnkd.in/gCJFH_4

New piece on Lumen Bioscience by Brian K. Buntz at Drug Discovery & Development — covers an incredible amount of ground in short order. https://lnkd.in/g5tcZzrK If we haven't been talking as much publicly the past 6 months, it's just because we've had our heads down, pushing these (many) programs forward. Watch this space.

New piece from me in Bioprocess Online today: https://lnkd.in/eAQHgKb5 It's clear that rising complexity is a drives escalating costs in clinical trials, but can simplification help with other segments of the new-drug product development process? FDA's @RobertCaliff has argued biopharma took a wrong turn with clinical trials: doing more "large, simple trials" can help reverse the steady decline in biopharma R&D productivity. (https://bit.ly/41eMgpw) It is also true for other parts of new-drug development? I think so. My new piece argues that reversing our industry's weird preference for complexity underlies other aspects of the R&D cost disease too. In particular the article urges a "back to basics" approach to design and manufacturing, with implications for product-market fit and pricing. For example: in a recent STAT piece (https://bit.ly/45DROKz) we showed through modeling that GMP development is an underrated source of R&D cost inflation (if properly adjusted for time-value of money and subsequent program attrition rates). Complexity is an ugly tax on progress, so simplifying things can accelerate and de-risk programs in surprising ways. Product developers in most other fields know this well, particularly software makers with their obsessions with user friendliness and "minimum viable products". Coming up with elegant, simple solutions is definitely harder than continuing to brute force things with money. But the days of cheap biopharma capital are clearly over, so we probably have no choice. Notably, the rise of the "minimal viable product" and cloud computing came to the software industry only AFTER the dot-com bubble burst. The crash set the stage for a renaissance, in other words. Could the same be true for our industry? We're optimistic here at Lumen Bioscience. What's your view?

A new paper out with our long-time AI/ML collaborators at @Google and @AAlphaBio: a first-of-its-kind AI/ML method to develop partially variant-proof antibodies for fast-mutating pandemic viruses like SARS-CoV-2. Check it out! https://lnkd.in/gShsqNwk Alone it’s not quite the full solution—in our view, for deep variant protection and high-speed development/deployment, you’ll still need the high-valence, mucosally delivered antibody cocktails only the @LumenBio platform can provide today. But I'm just talking my book there. Sadly, interest in pandemic defense has waned, but there are a few still working hard on it. Hopefully research like this will leave us better prepared the next time. (In our view, AL/ML design has only modest advantages over conventional tech in 'peacetime' drug development.) Tagging a few stalwarts here nonetheless! Bob Nelson at ARCH Venture Partners has always been a big fan of antibodies for pandemic defense. And as luck has it, was talking about AI/ML in clinical development with Jesse Guzman and a crowd at Pioneer Square Labs the night before this preprint dropped. BARDA has been a supporter of our work in this area (though not this particular project), and is one of the few remaining serious investors in pandemic defense, alongside DoD's JPEO-CBRND and Defense Health Agency (AMDRC, MIDRP, etc.). Keep up the good work everyone!